It’s time for UK construction to unite to get the industry off its knees and it’s time for politicians to “stop dancing round their handbags” and help.
Those were the messages that rang out at the launch of the Get Britain Building (GBB) campaign at Westminster last week.
Frankly the response from the MPs at the event was on the lacklustre side of underwhelming. The campaign presented them with a clear 10-point action plan to drag construction out of the worst slump it’s seen in more than two generations. But the politicians from the three main English parties at the launch barely commented on these at all and used the event, instead, to talk about their own policies, or knock their opponents’. Small wonder that the biggest round of applause went to the ‘handbags’ swipe from an impassioned Mike Leonard, boss of the Modern Masonry Alliance (MMA).
But the good news is that GBB is set to up the ante, with further lobbying, an online petition, campaign stickers and posters, even a Facebook group. It’s pledged not to stop kicking and screaming until the politicians take notice and take action.
Even better news is the broad, industry-wide constituency getting behind the campaign. How often have you seen the MMA sitting down in the same room as the UK Timber Frame Association and singing happily from the same song sheet?
“Having the debate about whether the houses we’re not building should be in timber frame or brick and block is pretty redundant,” said Chris Pateman, managing director of one of the architects of GBB, the Builders Merchants Federation. “We can keep those arguments until we start building them again. In the meantime we need everybody behind the campaign. The headline figure for building industry employment is 2.4 million, but if you widen it to everyone associated with the sector, the figure is more like 7 million and it’s feasible we could be looking at losing 10% of the workforce this year. That’s 700,000 jobs.”
And that’s just one of the reasons the GBB logo will be on the TTJ contents page until further notice.
